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I'm trying to create a pdf, the kind where you can zoom as close to the text as you want without it getting blurry. My goal is to upload it to issuu, the online publishing platform. I can create the kind of pdf in which the text stays sharp in Photoshop, and if I open it on my computer the text stays sharp, just like I want. But once uploaded to issuu, the text loses it's sharpness and becomes rasterized.

In InDesign I can make pdf's which stay sharp-texted even after being uploaded to issuu. The problem is that while I'm good with Photoshop, I can barely use InDesign. Just doing the whole thing in InDesign would be the best way to go, but if there's any way to avoid it, that would be great.

The question is: if I make a "sharp-texted" pdf in photoshop, and open it in some way in InDesign, is there a way to export it from InDesign so that it would keep its sharpness, even after being uploaded to issuu?

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    I would strongly advise, if this is magazine/brochure, is important to you to scrub up on InDesign. There's many reasons it's used instead of Photoshop for layout design by any publication house. You've come across one but you may not be aware of others which could impact the design and affect perception of what you're presenting. If this is just something for fun/not a portfolio piece/you're not going to be doing much more of this in the future, then perhaps learning InDesign is not so important.
    – biscuitstack
    Nov 24, 2017 at 9:03

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You can keep vector data for Photoshop Text and vector shapes created in Photoshop: Export your document as Photoshop PDF

However, please note that imported smart objects (like an Illustrator logo) will unfortunately be rasterized. So if you want to keep the sharpness of such elements, you'll have to place them directly in Indesign

Then just put your Photoshop PDF into Indesign using File > Place. Exporting to PDF from Indesign should retain vector datas.

NB: Export profile will be crucial, check the output carefully.

Hope that helps

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You can't control how Issu will render a document. Online apps have their own rendering issues, some of which are documented. It might be useful to first look at this article from their tech support.

If that won't work, try is to export everything in the best possible quality from Photoshop and avoid compressed formats like JPG. Try to save PSD or TIFF files of your pages/designs, then link these in InDesign, then export a PDF from InDesign using the 'High Quality Print' or 'Press Quality' export presets.

For even more quality, disable the compression in the InDesign export panel, by choosing 'Do not downsample' via the Compression tab for both color and grayscale images.

Uncheck the 'Compress Text and Lineart' feature at the bottom of the Compression tab.

Caution: depending on your artwork, this can result in a very large pdf.

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